Singapore’s Floating Apartment Building

Ok, so the building itself is not actually floating but the unique design of this apartment building gives the impression there’s not much holding up the residential dwellings. Created by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (or OMA) the Singapore Scotts Tower will be a 36 story, 153 meter tall tower located in the city’s shopping and lifestyle district and will include 68 high-end apartments.

The building’s design includes four individual apartment towers that are vertically offset from each other and suspended from a central core tower which is what makes it appear as if they’re floating. Besides being photo fodder for every tourist with a camera the lifted towers also reduce the building’s footprint leaving more room for park space and other leisure-related structures on the main floors.

I’ll agree that the building looks slick but I wonder how many potential customers are actually turned off by imaginative designs like this? I’m sure the engineering behind it is completely sound but people no longer have the feeling that tall buildings are indestructible given past events. (No matter how unique those events were.)

But then again, the Twin Towers were brought down even though they *weren’t* as exotically shaped as this project, so maybe people won’t think the exotic shape has anything to do with that.

Andrew Liszewski

Agreed. But even though the Twin Towers looked like fairly ‘ordinary’ buildings they were the first to use a revolutionary new design. If I’m not mistaken it was the first to use a central concrete core which allowed the outer walls to be made of steel and glass and each floor to be all open space.

But people saw what happened to what they thought was a standard building design so I have to wonder if unique designs like this would give the average person even less confidence.

Anonymous

apparently it’s not by OMA itself, but by one of their partners – Ole Scheeren – working outside the firm.

Actually a building of this sort (hanging on a central core) was put up in Vancouver BC Canada about 30+ years ago. It is only about 20 stories and one single building around a single core. I guess that would make the Twin Towers hanging building 2.0 and the one now planned for Singapore is v 3.0. The one in Vancouver was touted as being “more” earthquake proof than anything then erected in the city at that time.

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